Wednesday, August 31, 2016

I read a tweet shortly after the Windows anniversary update stating that lots of webcams have stopped working. I didn't think too much of it until I tried to join a VC this morning using Polycom RealPresence
Desktop app. It kept crashing when joining the VC and my brain kicked into gear.

I found the following link and applied the workaround registry settings and my webcam worked again!

The background is that in previous versions of Windows, only 1 application was able to access a webcam at any one point. This release introduces a service called Windows Camera Frame Service. The idea is that all applications will be able to access the webcam at the same time. This is particularly useful for the new authentication methods Microsoft have been advertising on the TV.

To introduce this service, Microsoft had to turn off compression of the webcam stream to stop the inevitable CPU increase of a bunch of different applications all trying to uncompress the stream at the same time.

The downside of this is that most USB webcams and even integrated cameras are connected using USB2 interfaces which can only transmit 480MB/s. Using compression allows HD to flow quite freely over USB2, but turn off compression and you have a big problem. The above registry key disables this new mode.

Dropbox Hack was real

There has been talk for quite some time about a mythical hack of Dropbox which happened in 2012. Well this morning the mythical status was stripped away as top notch security guru Troy Hunt validated the dumps as real. There are 60M records inside the dump but fortunately passwords with weaker hashes have been salted and the strong hashes are unsalted. If this has been the other way around, it could have been carnage!

This one is fairly minor, but recently I made the switchover from keeping notes in Google Keep to OneNote. The flexibility of OneNote was attractive. Today I realised that you can press this little beauty of a button whilst in a note and select a meeting from your Outlook Calendar, then all of the meeting details including title, agenda and attendees are copied to your note! Amazing